Follow along with my WorldEmber progress!

I promised you a look over my shoulder this month as I bring a vague and disjointed collection of ideas together into a cohesive piece of world-building. These resources will help you keep track of my progress through this month-long marathon challenge:

• Haly’s Official WE Progress Report — each participant gets a page that automatically collects their author information and all WE-eligible articles across all worlds into a single, shareable package.
• Haly’s WorldEmber on Argentii Index — an on-the-fly journal page and handy sidebar displaying only new Argentii WE-eligible articles.

A World of More than Nouns

The human brain thrives on familiarity and so it’s natural for us to develop ruts, or familiar, well-worn paths. Paths of travel when we find an easy and reliable route. Paths of speaking such as contractions and slang. Paths of creativity when we work only in a single style, medium, or genre.

We get the term from the narrow groves left in a road from wheels wearing away a frequently-used path. The deeper these channels get, the harder it is to remove ourselves from them, and the more damage that can be done in the process. If you’ve ever played Oregon Trail and broken an axle or a wheel, it was either from a rock or a rut!

When it comes to creativity, it’s best to try and avoid these ruts to begin with by practicing new techniques, styles, and mediums on a regular basis. It’s ok if you don’t like it, but flexing your creative muscles in new ways will help not only your art, but your brain as well.

Whether you’re finding yourself in a rut (like me) or working to avoid one, all of these techniques are meant to do the same thing: encourage your brain to explore new ways of thinking creatively.

The Benefit of Templates

During this WorldEmber season, I’ve been in a rut centered on ‘locations’. Geography, landmarks, buildings, and other important places have dominated my worldbuilding.

One of the benefits to working with a tool like WorldAnvil is that it provides a slew of templates designed to not only remind you that there is more to a world than ‘places’ or ‘people’, but also to help you dig deep into each of the topics they cover!

Even without WorldAnvil, a quick web search will turn up a ton of resources for worldbuilding templates, from entire published workbooks, to free resources on Tumblr and Reddit.

Good Ol’ W5H

Those of you who’ve been here longer than a week or two know that Saturdays are dedicated to inspiring your creativity in a column I call “Quick Six.” Each week, I craft six worldbuilding prompts that are suitable regardless of setting or genre.

These prompts are built on the journalistic tradition of W5H: who, what, when, where, why, and how. In news reporting, these are used as the foundation for evaluating the basic facts of a story. In worldbuilding, they can serve as a quick check for creating a well-balanced and immersive world.

The ABCs of Worldbuilding

This is a particularly fun piece of advice and one I frequently put into practice.

Set a timer for a few minutes, no more than five. Then, begin listing as many different worldbuilding words or phrases as you can, starting with ‘A’ and moving through the alphabet. Try to make each next word as unrelated to the first as possible. (For example, I wouldn’t say architecture for ‘A’ and buildings for ‘B’.) When you’re done, use the list as inspiration for your worldbuilding.

Don’t stress if you can’t come up with a word for every letter! There are only so many times you can say “queens” and “zoology” in your brainstorming. Just skip anything that doesn’t immediately jump out at you.

Argentii for Example

Things I need to build more of:

• Animals
• I need to make up more of the common animals; pets, domestic farm animals, wild animals, etc.
• Buildings
• I need to write about the style of buildings, and their layouts.
• Clothing
• Fabrics and styles vary wildly from island to island, based on available resources, climate, and other factors.
• Decorations
• From jewelry to art, what do people use to beautify life and the space around them?
• Education
• The guild system is very important to Argentii, but how does it work?
• I also need to explore childhood education.
• Food
• I love including recipes in my worldbuilding.
• This is a viable avenue to selling a book based on my world!

As you can see, I didn’t have to get very far into the alphabet before I have an entire list of new directions to explore. And each is clearly different from the others, meaning that I will have to work hard developing connections between them.

All of this will go far to not only developing new creative neutral pathways, but also to ensuring that you’ve got a rich and immersive world full of life for your stories to thrive!

Have you tried any of these techniques? Are you planning to experiment with any that are new to you? Let me know in the comments!!

Wrapping the Day

Please, please send me your WORLD-BUILDING questions NOW!! I want to pre-schedule my 12/25 and 1/1 posts so that I can maximize the time I spend with my family on these holidays!

As I write this, I am sitting at 31,592 new words of world-building toward my 50,000-word goal.